Tired, always she seemed tired, as though coming down with a cold. The humidifier was blowing normally, according to the gauge on the wall—Paraguayan humidity—no danger to the lice colonies that she tended. She made a mental note to check the alarm’s trigger later, a lack of energy making her put off everything—and she returned to the monotony of transferring blood-fed lice into OviPots.
As she worked, she tried to slip back into the graphic novel that she drew in her free time. But it was getting harder. Not harder to daydream, just harder to keep pace with banana trees that shed leaves of synthetic skin, mice that chirp, scorpions with the intelligence of rats and the rest of the genetic mess that the wild was becoming. How strange—after all the disaster films—Planet of the Apes—after the countless books, movies, video games, and scientific studies too—the Club of Rome—after all the denial, there was such an explosion of life just as the planet was dying.
Not dying. Still, it was hard to get her mind around the idea of an earth that all humanity had known becoming a place that none of those old-planet people would recognize….
NGers got tattoos of Red Marble Earth: that black-and-red cartoon meme of Earth boiling off its atmosphere as though it were a meteor. But maybe the best tattoo would be of a cargo ship the size of Kansas, traveling from China to America and passing as it did an identical ship traveling from America to China, and both loaded with cars. Whatever. The punks just got their tattoos then went back to their barista jobs. And most people didn’t even do that much. They just went to work. They had their morning coffee, tucked in their kids at night, worried about house payments, and updated their software. Even the people she worked with here in the lab were more worried about the next outbreak of avian influenza, H5N5, the virus spread like the common cold and characterized by its sudden onset and internal bleeding. Rapid contagion, and a mortality rate that can approach 100%: ‘The Big One,’ they called it, the tsunami of bird flues that could make the Covid-19 outbreak—with its food shortages and outdoor morgues—look like the sniffles.
Who wouldn’t feel run-down given that to think about 24/7? Working in the Insectarium all day didn’t help. She sighed at the containers of sand flies, the wall of ducks, geese, and other birds in glass containment boxes like feathered fish in aquariums: Blue Fronted Parrots, captured in Paraguay, crawling with lice, specimens to generate the data Chen needed for his statistical analysis. Olympia, the PI directing the study, had had Gabe blunt the beaks on the parrots so they couldn’t preen, allowing their lice populations to shoot up. Some of the birds scratched themselves incessantly. Others sat there enduring.
The room was sealed as tight as a walk-in refrigerator with industrial-strength doors—the perfect setting for one of those doomsday scenarios where someone emerges from a bank’s vault, or fireproof storage room to discover that the rest of the world had perished in a nuclear blast. Or been overrun by zombies…. Should she put zombies in her story? Looking toward the listless parrots, she realized that they were already there….
Except instead of the supplies that would stock a real bomb shelter, the wire shelving of her vault held OviPots of the fleas, lice, and flies that she bred for the labs: Tupperware containers of Stage 1 larva and Stage 2 larva that she fed on the mold that grew on ground-up rabbit feces, nursing them into adulthood; she’d fertilize the disease-carrying adults, let them feed on the geese, then bear eggs that she’d nurse into Stage 1 larva, trapping her in a cycle that needed constant care, even on holidays—sauna-like heat and humidity, the mind-numbing drone of the humidifiers, and smell. Whatever was good for the lice and flies, she, their bitch, had to take….
Gabe selected a mouth aspirator, and threaded the business end of its rubber hose into the glass box she had filled with lice from the birds. She began to suck. The cage was suddenly a snow globe of bird lice and human shrieks, she imagined, her aspirator the Godzilla to their Tokyo. The lice fled to the white light that their neurobiology equated with escape but was actually the white cloth that she’d stretched across the back of the cage where their tiny black bodies would stand out, making them easy to catch.
If only they could step outside their own story for the god’s-eye view of what was happening.
She was after the females that had taken a blood meal from the birds, their tiny bodies bloated with bird blood as compared to the more elongated males. As she sucked one after another into the tube, she made a mark on a scrap of paper for every 10 she caught.
Another Shitty Day in Paradise, said the postcard taped to the wall, its edges curled. If she used her imagination, its palm trees swayed in a beach breeze instead of the air stream of the humidifier. Eden. Wish you were here! It was from Guy. When his unit was called up, he was first sent to Bahrain, which locals claimed was the site of Eden, and he’d e-mailed everyone in the lab a postcard. Sunshine. The drone of surf. Heat. Humidity. Beads of sweat running down her back. She could almost imagine the rubber hose she sucked on as a straw in a piña colada—if it weren’t for the stench of feces, if she didn’t feel like the last woman on Earth. And this, a man on a TED Talk said, may well end up being the pinnacle of civilization.
Whatever.